Immune Cells Versus Cancer
The use of immune cells to attack cancer has been going on for many years, but it's only recently that biotechnology has become inexpensive and sophisticated enough to understand why early immunotherapies only sometimes worked. Via EurekAlert!: "One treatment option for patients with late-stage melanoma involves removing natural cancer-fighting T cells from the tumor, expanding their numbers in culture dishes, and then re-infusing them into the patient. This strategy - called adoptive immunotherapy - causes tumor regression in about half the patients treated, some of whom survive for decades without relapse. ... Among the cells taken from a patient who has remained tumor-free for more than a decade, [researchers] found naturally-arising T cells that recognized a new protein, which they dubbed "meloe-1." Meloe-1, the group found, is highly expressed in melanoma cells but not in normal skin cells or in other types of cancer. When they looked at the transferred cells from the other patients, they found meloe-1-specific T cells in 5 of the 9 patients who remained relapse-free, but in none of the 21 patients who relapsed." This sort of knowledge, categorized by cancer type, will lead to highly efficient immunotherapies in the years ahead.
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/rup-tcr100908.php